The mission of Five Tuition is to help students be successful in school (and in life). For that reason, we try our best to ensure that our approach is in alignment to and not in competition with The Australian Curriculum.
To better understand the Australian Curriculum, visit the publicly accessible Australian Curriculum website. There, you’ll see details of the following:
Learning Areas – more commonly known as Subjects. Examples that we are all familiar with include Mathematics and English.
General Capabilities focuses on the ways in which students apply knowledge from the Learning Areas. Knowing how to calculate the gradient of a straight-line graph is important. But, it is arguably more important to know how to use a spreadsheet programme to calculate this gradient in the context of a real-world problem.
Cross-Curriculum Priorities are common themes or high-priority topics that need to be addressed consistently across the Learning Areas. Sustainability, for example is a priority that can be addressed in Science, English and other Learning Areas.
From our perspective, schools are doing an excellent job implementing the Australian Curriculum and in so doing, helping to nurture “successful learners, confident and creative individuals, and active and informed citizens” (ACARA).
The value Five Tuition adds is that we offer a ‘curriculum’ that supports the efforts of schools. We define this curriculum as the conversation that takes place between the tutor and student (Grumet, 1995).
In this definition are three elements to unpack: the role of students, the role of tutors and the nature of the conversation.
The Student
The starting point of our curriculum is the Student. Students are regarded as active constructors of knowledge encouraged to take ownership of their learning. They set their own targets, apply habits of mind to achieve those targets, reflect on their progress and perhaps more importantly, learn to ask for help. Help-seeking is an important self-regulated learning strategy (Karabenick & Berger, 2013). This is true not only for children but also adults.
The Tutor
Above and beyond their role as ‘teachers’, tutors at Five are coaches, mentors, leaders. Having recently travelled the path students are now travelling, tutors are encouraged to reflect on their own journey, to recall strategies that helped them when they were in school and at university, to articulate these strategies and to guide students in applying them effectively.
The Conversation
The coaching / mentoring / tutoring relationship between the tutor and student is facilitated by and strengthened through conversation. As a framework for guiding the conversation we offer our tutors the Gradual Release of Responsibility model. Within this model, tutors help students by probing, explaining, enlightening, demonstrating, encouraging, challenging and providing feedback.
Along the way, we facilitate Tutor Development (TD) sessions to add to tutors’ repertoire of knowledge and skills. For example, TD in 2020 emphasized the importance of impact and in 2021, we facilitated a workshop on Habits of Mind (Costa & Kallick, 2008). The focus of this year’s tutor development is on making learning vsible (Bloom, 1956; Hattie, 2018).
This is not to say that information on textbooks, worksheets, notes, and even the metaverse are not important. These are valuable resources that are harnessed to inform, support and evaluate conversations. We will continue to explore and provide tutors and students with the necessary resources to set them up for success.
References
Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) . (n.d.). Australian curriculum. Retrieved from https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/.
Bloom, B. S. (1956). "Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook I: The Cognitive Domain." New York: David McKay Co Inc.
Costa, A. L., & Kallick, B. (Eds.). (2008). Learning and leading with habits of mind: 16 essential characteristics for success. ASCD.
Hattie, J. (2018, November 15). John Hattie on Visible Learning and Feedback in the Classroom [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/Vpq09eY4pZo
Grumet, M. (1995). The curriculum: What are the basics and are we teaching them. Thirteen questions, 2, 15-21.
Karabenick, S. A., & Berger, J.-L. (2013). Help seeking as a self-regulated learning strategy. In H. Bembenutty, T. J. Cleary, & A. Kitsantas (Eds.), Applications of self-regulated learning across diverse disciplines: A tribute to Barry J. Zimmerman (pp. 237–261). IAP Information Age Publishing.